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日本語の省略現象と談話の一貫性 : 自由転送システムにおける極小主義的再分析
No full textThis dissertation investigates licensing mechanisms of ellipsis. To this end, I focus on null arguments and null adjuncts in Japanese, whose theoretical status has long been actively discussed in the generative literature on null anaphora. The first part of this dissertation is dedicated to the discussion on the prodrop vs. Verb-Stranding VP-Ellipsis vs. Argument Ellipsis debate concerning the syntax of Japanese null arguments. I bring back to light the importance of more careful analyses of discourses where null anaphora occur, and propose a discourse condition within the Question Under Discussion framework (Roberts 1996/2012). Specifically, I argue that null anaphora in general requires the target phrase to be backgrounded in a coherent discourse. I then show that the seemingly mysterious interpretive properties of null arguments reported in the literature are actually explained by the proposed discourse condition. Additionally, a set of data examined from this novel perspective is shown to support the Argument Ellipsis analysis over the pro-drop and Verb-Stranding VP-Ellipsis analyses. Further, taking into account the discourse factors that may have been overlooked in previous studies reveals that the syntax of AE is maximally simple; it can apply freely to arguments in Japanese syntax. Extending the discourse-based analysis, I examine data on null adjuncts. Although null adjuncts have recently been known to exhibit even more puzzling behaviors in Japanese, I demonstrate that licensing of null adjuncts is also accounted for by the current Question Under Discussion-based analysis. Given this, I also discuss in detail the syntactic mechanisms behind the derivation of null arguments. I first present arguments for the structural approach over the non-structural “purely pragmatic” approach to null adjuncts (Landau 2023). I then disprove the syntactic Verb-Stranding VP-Ellipsis analysis of null adjuncts (Funakoshi 2016, among others) and show that the alternative Adjunct Ellipsis analysis (Oku 2016; Tanabe and Kobayashi to appear, among others) is correct. Finally, I explore in more detail the syntactic mechanisms involved in Argument Ellipsis and Adjunct Ellipsis in Japanese. I put forth a unified PF-deletion analysis of them, in which deletion operation applies to the units of Transfer. The proposed “Transfer-based” account of Japanese ellipsis has an implication to possible parametrizations concerning the role of syntax in ellipsislicensing in the Japanese-type vs. English-type languages. Overall, the present study sheds new light on the syntax-semantics/pragmatics interface in ellipsis-licensing. Most importantly, the study reminds ourselves the importance of studying syntax by carefully examining the interactions of syntax with other modules
